Wishful thinking and self-deception

Wishful thinking is interpreting facts, reports, events, perceptions, etc., according to what one would like to be the
case rather than according to the actual evidence. For example, I am convinced that my girlfriend is faithful even
though several of my friends have told me they’ve seen her being intimate with another guy. Self-deception is the
process or fact of misleading ourselves to accept as true or valid what is false or invalid. Self-deception, in short, is
a way we justify false beliefs to ourselves. When I convince myself that my girlfriend is unfaithful to me because
she loves me and is just trying to make me jealous, I’m deceiving myself.
We often believe things
not because we have good
evidence for them but
because we want to believe
them. We tend to construe
things in our own favor, to
look for evidence that fits
with what we already
believe or want to believe.
Too often, we are easily
deceived when it suits our
purposes. We allow loyalty or hostility to control how we think about those we love and hate. Too often, we see
only what we want to see and believe only what we want to believe. For example, when mail with money for our
daughter is found opened and empty or when money is stolen from our house, we don’t want to believe that it is
our own son who is doing the stealing, so we accept his claims of innocence at face value. When he suggests that it
might have been one of his friends or a friend of a friend, we are all too ready to put the blame elsewhere. We don’t
need any evidence of guilt; our wish not to believe our own son is a thief is sufficient to deceive us into thinking
we know who the guilty party really is.
Our desire to succeed at some task may make us
blind to our faults or inadequacies, resulting in our
putting blame for our own lack of ability on others.
The most perverted form of this type of self-deception
occurs in those who refuse to face facts about their
own lack of intelligence, ambition, or skill, and so
blame other races, ethnic groups or religions for their
own troubles. No failure in their lives is due to any
action or inaction on their own part. The fault is
always with some other group: Catholics, Jews, Muslims; Protestants, Republicans, Democrats; Africans, Asians,
Mexicans; Serbs, Croatians, Americans; Arabs, Iranians, Israelis, or dead white European males.
*Ninety-four percent of university professors think they are better at their jobs
than their colleagues.
Twenty-five percent of college students believe they are in the top 1% in terms of
their ability to get along with others.
Seventy percent of college students think they are above average in leadership
ability. Only two percent think they are below average.
---Thomas Gilovich How We Know What Isn’t So
*“We are never deceived; we deceive ourselves.” --Goethe
“We like to be deceived.” --Blaise Pascal
“....delusions are always more alluring than facts.”
--Clarence Darrow
The Forer Effect
People have a tendency to accept a vague and general personality description as uniquely applicable to themselves
without realizing that the same description could be applied to just about anyone. Psychologist B. R. Forer gave a
personality test to his students, ignored their answers, and gave the same assessment to each student. He asked
them to grade their assessment on a scale of 0 to 5, with 5 being very accurate. The evaluation average was 4.26.
The test has been repeated hundreds of time and the average remains around 4.2.
The Forer effect may be why many people believe in astrology, biorhythms, fortune telling, graphology, palm
reading, and other such methods of character analysis. Forer thought that gullibility could account for the
customers’ tendency to accept identical personality assessments. It seems more complicated than that and may
involve not only gullibility, but self-deception, wishful thinking, and confirmation bias (see below).
People tend to accept claims about themselves in proportion to their desire that the claims be true rather
than in proportion to the empirical accuracy of the claims as measured by some nonsubjective standard.
We tend to accept questionable, even false statements about ourselves, if we deem them positive or
flattering enough. We often give very liberal interpretations to vague or inconsistent claims about ourselves
in order to make sense out of the claims. (Carroll 2003: 147).
The Forer effect is sometimes referred to as the Barnum effect, after P.T. Barnum who claimed to have something
for everybody.